Discussed in #17300
Originally posted by cl0ck-byte April 14, 2026
Description:
When outpost populations are dwindling, the number of NPCs that are spawned will be lowered--special NPCs like the merchant, ship upgrader, and medic are not preferred when this occurs, and thus there will be instances where security officers and mechanics are spawned in their place due to random chance:
A "fixed" version of this would involve some sort of prioritizing of special NPCs + essential NPCs (engineer for reactor, etc) that need to be chosen/kept around.
Reproduction Steps:
Saving and exiting with a lower population "public" outpost tends to reset the population to something large, so repeat the below when testing this:
- Load into a campaign
togglecampaignteleportdebugai (if you'd like)- Teleport around stations (or constantly left click on one) to change population sizes
- Arrive at an outpost that is around ~8 population (usually throws out a large portion of special NPCs)
- Some special NPCs like the merchant or medic will be missing
Additional Information:
Personally I think a level of randomness is interesting here--if an outpost is on the brink of abandonment, there's a chance a merchant could just straight up leave before any other NPC, but I think it's important that at least the merchant is guaranteed to be on an outpost--this will help prevent campaign softlocks far more than having the other special NPCs around.
Version:
release/dlc-companion-update 04/15/2026 (MDY) - ba8c8d59ba8011278e49efef8c916a29f75be614
Discussed in #17300
Originally posted by cl0ck-byte April 14, 2026
Description:
When outpost populations are dwindling, the number of NPCs that are spawned will be lowered--special NPCs like the merchant, ship upgrader, and medic are not preferred when this occurs, and thus there will be instances where security officers and mechanics are spawned in their place due to random chance:
A "fixed" version of this would involve some sort of prioritizing of special NPCs + essential NPCs (engineer for reactor, etc) that need to be chosen/kept around.
Reproduction Steps:
Saving and exiting with a lower population "public" outpost tends to reset the population to something large, so repeat the below when testing this:
togglecampaignteleportdebugai(if you'd like)Additional Information:
Personally I think a level of randomness is interesting here--if an outpost is on the brink of abandonment, there's a chance a merchant could just straight up leave before any other NPC, but I think it's important that at least the merchant is guaranteed to be on an outpost--this will help prevent campaign softlocks far more than having the other special NPCs around.
Version:
release/dlc-companion-update 04/15/2026 (MDY) - ba8c8d59ba8011278e49efef8c916a29f75be614